WHALE FLOW

What counts as a big holder?

An address sitting on at least 1,000 Bitcoin. The page follows the very biggest separately, the addresses holding 10,000 or more, and the band between the two is what is left when the second is taken out of the first. Both lines are drawn in coins rather than dollars, so what they are worth rises and falls with the price. The crowd calls this group whales; the page does not need the slang.

What does the line show?

The line adds up the Bitcoin held by every address sitting on at least 1,000 coins. Its latest reading is 7,180,831 BTC. The four other views widen the line in the sand to 100, 10, 1 and 0.1 coins; each of those contains the one before it, so they are nested piles rather than slices, and nothing on this page adds them together.

Who are they?

The blockchain does not label addresses, so nothing on this page says who holds any one of them, or how the group splits between kinds of holder. What is known is that exchanges keep their customers’ coins in large cold-storage addresses, and custodians hold coins for funds and companies, so part of the group is holding other people’s Bitcoin. The rest can be companies, funds or single wealthy holders, and the record cannot tell them apart.

What does a change mean?

The page compares how much this group holds on the latest settled day with how much it held 7, 30 and 90 days before it. When the total goes up, more Bitcoin is sitting in big addresses: they are adding. When it goes down, less is: they are letting go. The buying and selling itself happens on exchanges and at trading desks the blockchain cannot see, and what shows up here is the balance left behind.

Why three different stretches?

One week is noise. A single transfer between two of an exchange's own addresses can move the whole line for a day, which is why the page reads the same balance over three overlapping stretches. It calls the group adding only when at least two of them rose and none fell, letting go only when at least two fell and none rose, and steady when none moved by more than a coin. Anything else is mixed. On the latest reading the pile let 8,825 BTC go over the past 7 days, let 21,838 BTC go over 30 and let 13,436 BTC go over 90.

Why addresses and not people?

Because addresses are all the blockchain shows. One person can spread coins across hundreds of addresses, and one exchange address can hold coins for millions of customers at once. So a count here is a count of places coins sit, not a headcount of holders, and a number moving up does not mean that many more people.

How far back does it go?

The daily record starts on 9 Jan 2009 and runs to 28 Sep 2026, 6,472 readings. The line starts at zero: no address held 1,000 coins or more until 23 Jan 2009. It stays low through 2009, never above 127,679 BTC, because far less Bitcoin existed and most of it sat in smaller amounts: all year, addresses with 1,000 coins or more held under a tenth of all Bitcoin, against 35.7% on the latest day.